1. Parking meters should not operate on any City and County holiday listed sfgov.org, on Sundays, or outside the hours of 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Commencing July 1, 2015, fees for parking garages, meters, parking tickets, and neighborhood parking permits should be frozen for five years, allowing the City to annually adjust thereafter only for Consumer Price Index (CPI) increases.

2. The introduction of parking meters or variable meter pricing into neighborhoods where they currently do not exist should be allowed only upon petition by the majority of the affected households and merchants.

3. A portion of any additional parking or motorists’ fees and new bond monies earmarked for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) should go to the construction and operation of neighborhood parking garages.

Free parking subsidizes driving and is a gross mis-allocation of fixed urban space. The 300 square feet or so that is often required to house a single car costs significantly less than other uses of that space, be it for housing, retail or commercial office space. Parking spaces also eat into tax revenue if the same space was used instead for small businesses or residential property.

Bay Area transportation planner Jeffrey Tumlin posted this provocative tweet the other month:

(I think his numbers are off on parking costs, as parking spots in many of the city’s eastern neighborhoods already rent for between $200-350 per month. But you get the picture.)

Free parking and the cruising it instigates also created the perverse incentives that gave rise to predatory parking startups like MonkeyParking. When MonkeyParking and other startups cropped up to let users sell information about the availability of free parking spaces to others, the city government had already been building dynamic pricing into parking through an innovative pilot program. But this proposition would could make this pilot DOA, if not hampered by neighborhood review.

So before you go on about services like Uber and Lyft or these private bus lines creating disinvestment in public transit, keep in mind that the car (and the highway infrastructure and parking spots it needed) was the ultimate instrument of disinvestment in urban mass transit in the first half of the 20th century.

0

CrunchBase

BioSean Parker is a serial entrepreneur and a managing partner at the Founders Fund. As one of the three founders of Napster in 1999, Sean helped architect and manage the peer-to-peer file sharing application to become one of the largest on the net.
Parker subsequently helped found and manage Plaxo, a VC-backed contact management application company.
More recently, Parker worked as the Founding President …